MUMBAI, India — Three weeks after the Mumbai attacks, the public's attention here is slowly drifting back to the less weighty topics of cricket and Bollywood.
After tackling in his recent novels the weighty topics of the Iraq war, family betrayal and sexual inadequacy, it is not surprising that Ian McEwan's next endeavour would address something of similar import - the pressing question of climate change.
There is no lack of weighty topics on her agenda.
I vividly recall the afternoon in eighth grade English class, when, after doling out her daily lecture on how the Beatles embodied every evil of communism, our teacher, Miss Hair, turned to a more weighty topic: the unspeakable evils of the split infinitive.
Plenty of other titles provide ample grist for discussion of weighty topics like the place of video games in the artistic firmament and the evolving modalities of personal entertainment.
Being careless about a weighty topic doesn't help anyone, though, and it takes thoughtful and considered artistic work to fall on the good side of the scale.
So when a study in the British Medical Journal barged its way to the front of health care headlines last week (past more weighty topics, like news of a new and highly lethal flu strain in China), I was all ears... and scalp.
JUST days before a meeting in the Hague on March 24th, where Barack Obama and Xi Jinping were to discuss North Korea, climate change, Ukraine, cybersecurity and other weighty topics, the wives of the two leaders met in Beijing and managed for the most part to keep a lighter tone.
THE former adult film star Sasha Grey has made a career out of creatively and willfully exploiting her body while nodding at an assortment of weighty topics: performance art, philosophy and girl power among them.
